Beirut and I

Devastation. It seems like all the words have been said and all the feels have been felt and yet I continue to hold on to a palpable orb of energy and words that struggles for release. It is 3 days after the Beirut port explosion’s 1st year anniversary. Devastation.

An ominous feeling crept up this year as August came closer. The feeling was strange, a mixture of individually familiar emotions although together, they formed a perfect recipe for a yet to be elucidated, strange concoction.

I braced myself. I barricaded and prepared my mind in the days leading up to the dreaded day but it never felt truly ready. And then it is there, the day, the fourth one to be accurate, the fourth day of August to be precise.

The creeping dread culminated in a crescendo of images, reels, declarations, denunciations, protests, screams, cries, stories of loved ones lost and of homes in shambles and above all, an onslaught of people, just like myself, attempting to process their own grief and sorrow for the loss of a city and of an already thinning concept of a country.

A mind floats amongst these spheres. Just another sphere existing, surviving, maintaining the body it inhabits, mostly out of necessity. Make no mistake however, in the midst of such entropy, that mind merely floats in a sort of aimless drift.

It would be difficult and unfair to say that this piece is an homage, it would be difficult and unfair to say it is in commemoration I am not entirely sure what it is. What it definitely draws from is another piece below when I first started drawing “Entangled” from 2019. Tumultuous pieces in tumultuous times.

Entangled - 2019